Rafael Benítez’s return to Valencia with Real Madrid was heralded by the home side’s fans but spelled the end for his reign at the Bernabéu.
Photograph: Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP

The banner was unfurled four minutes into the game and it was huge, stretching all the way along the stand on Calle Doctor Juan Reglá, big black letters on a white sheet. Rafael Benítez’s face was drawn at one end, smiling. “Rafa,” the message said, “you gave us the best days of our lives. Thank you.” As the fans held it up, they chanted his name and briefly he raised his hand. The supporters were on his side this time; the problem was that they were not Real Madrid’s fans; they were Valencia’s. Whistled at the Santiago Bernabéu, he was welcomed at Mestalla.

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He was not welcome back in Madrid. On Tuesday Madrid will hold their annual open-doors training session, attended by supporters. Benítez could well have faced more abuse there but as it turns out, he will not be there at all. By Monday evening the inevitable had finally happened: Benítez was no longer manager of Real Madrid. The surprise was that it had taken this long and that a draw, not a defeat, had been enough for them to end it. Barely a week after Florentino Pérez insisted that Benítez would not be sacked, he was sacked. The contrast with the night before was eloquent.

Benítez had not sat on the bench at Mestalla since May 2004. He returned for the first time last night to the club he joined in 2001, now as an opponent. Back then, a board member mistook him for a bullfighter when he arrived – “Well,” remembered the sporting director Javier Subirats, summing it up, “some board members don’t know anything about football” – and halfway through his first season he had been on the verge of the sack, surviving with a 3-2 win against Espanyol at Montjuïc. But five months later they had won an unlikely league title. The best days of their life? Probably.

Alongside the banner on Sunday was a picture of the two league titles and the Uefa Cup Valencia won in three years under Benítez. They had not previously won the league in 31 years and they have not won it in the decade since. A lot has happened here since he left for Liverpool. His right-back is coach of the B team; his centre-back has been coach of the first team, and so have 12 others. There have been nine presidents, one of whom ended up in court against his captain. Time has not diminished what he did. It has underlined it.

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Benítez was “heavy-going”, his Valencia players admit. He banned paella and ice cream and drills went on and on. His first game was in August 2001 when Valencia beat Real Madrid, swarming all over them, racing round the pitch “like motorbikes” in David Albelda’s words. It was Zinedine Zidane’s debut and afterwards the Frenchman asked, bewildered: “Will it always be like this?” When they met at the Bernabéu, a ludicrous penalty was given to Raúl and Benítez moaned: “You have to do twice as much here.” But still he brought the galácticos down to earth. A decade on he is their manager. Well, he was.

On Sunday Benítez returned, in charge of the club that Valencia fans hate most, the one that he had defeated and now seemed to be defeating him. How much longer he would be there no one really knew then. Get the wrong result and the answer would be: not long at all. It often feels as if his press conferences take place in Punxsutawney, “will you get sacked if you lose?” playing on a loop. “I hope you’re asking me that question for two or three years,” he replied on Saturday, which was a fairly grim hope. Twenty-four hours later, after the 2-2 draw at Valencia, one reporter began: “So, here we are again …”

“It’s like I always say …” Benítez said. And it was.

Facing Valencia was an opportunity but it was also an obligation. For the third time in four league games Barcelona had drawn, this time a 0-0 at Espanyol. And, if Atlético’s late winner against Levante meant that Madrid could not go top, a victory would put them level with Barcelona (having played a game more), just two points behind the new leaders, Atlético. Win and Benítez would stay in a job; lose, they said, and he would not. And Valencia were determined for him to lose. “The gratitude will last a minute and then it’s over,” Gary Neville had warned. Draw and, well, here we are again … Only this time was the last time.

Asked if he feared for his job (again), Benítez insisted: “That is a question that only makes sense if you only look at the result … we saw a great Madrid; there were more things to praise than to criticise.” But the question did make sense; it also confirmed what Benítez must have always known: the assurances made to him were worthless.

Sunday night’s 2-2 draw was a frantic, exciting game that came in pairs. Valencia got the penalty that levelled it immediately after Gareth Bale should have had a penalty at the other end; when Mateo Kovacic was sent off, leaving Madrid with 10 men, it came as Valencia broke after Ronaldo had gone down in the area; Bale’s goal to put Madrid into the lead was followed 71 seconds later by Paco Alcácer heading Valencia level again. In the very last minute, Álvaro Negredo could, and should, have won it … and so could Bale have done. “They escaped alive!” claimed the Valencian paper Super Deporte. “We could have won,” said Neville. “And lost.”

That went for both of them. As Madrid’s players celebrated the second goal in the 83rd minute, Benítez approached them on the touchline and gestured for them to remain compact; this was time for seriousness, not celebration. A man down but a goal up with seven minutes to go, he knew better than anyone how important this win was: don’t let it slip. Seconds later they had done exactly that. “All you can do is lament that,” he said. At that point he still believed that a draw might be sufficient. It was not.

A draw at Valencia is no disgrace, still less with 10 men. Barcelona drew at Mestalla and Valencia did not lose a single league game there in 2015; it was defeat there that began Madrid’s slide last season. The point was perhaps a good one and Benítez was entitled to think that he might have emerged strengthened from it but he knew that the sentence had already been passed down.

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On Saturday it seemed that he had perhaps sensed as much; this time his discourse changed. No longer his master’s voice, he instead pointed the finger at the structure of the squad – and at the members of his squad too.

In an analysis that described the “eminently attacking nature” of Madrid’s squad as their “problem”, an unusually blunt assessment that cannot have pleased the board, Benítez had talked about players of casta and raza, spirit and leadership. Players like Alfredo Di Stéfano – who, for all his talent, famously told Amancio Amaro “you have to sweat to earn [this shirt], sunshine” – José Antonio Camacho, Juanito, and Pirri, the man who played one game in 1975 with a broken jaw. Against Valencia Benítez left out James Rodríguez and Isco and there was spirit, as Sergio Ramos insisted. There was certainly merit in going 2-1 up with 10 men.

Not everyone agreed, though: this was, after all, not just one game. It was another bullet wasted, another train they had failed to catch, another opportunity gone. Barcelona had handed them the chance to close the gap and they had not taken it. Some of the difficulties they faced were familiar ones, too: Valencia often ran through the midfield unchallenged, led by the superb André Gomes. “Carry on with this?” asked Tomas Guasch in Marca. “Madrid can win lose or draw but never like this … and it’s not the first time.” If that judgment was harsh, so was a colleague’s. “Who has Benítez drawn against?” asked Josevi Hernáez, before listing the teams he has drawn against.

Madrid could have won this but they did not. And that was familiar too: 17 points have slipped away from them in the opening 18 weeks of the season. Another big game had ended without them taking all three points. Victories against most teams are taken as read, barely given any value at all. Against Barcelona, Sevilla, Atlético, Villarreal, Valencia, Madrid have won none. Ronaldo’s goals provide some measure of their difficulties against the better sides: he has scored 25 this season, more than anyone else, but none of them against Athletic (whom Madrid did beat), Atlético, PSG (in two matches), Sevilla, Barcelona, Villarreal or Valencia.

“Benítez is not the problem, Benítez is the solution,” the president Florentino Pérez said. That is what he said publicly, anyway. Privately he was briefing otherwise. He was not convinced by the alternatives but knew that sacking his manager left him exposed. Resisting it, though, became impossible and he had not been certain about Benítez almost from the start. The players were even less enamoured; the situation had become unsustainable. Any peace was always going to be precarious. Some players had already been told not to worry; he will not be there for long. A win would only have postponed the inevitable. A draw, too, might have done but finally the decision was made.

On Sunday night the players’ backing of Benítez, a manager with whom few really connected, was not exactly wholehearted. It was, rather, an invitation to sack him. On MondayOnMonday Pérez took that up. “Benítez has crédito but it does not depend on us,” added Ramos. “Obviously, whichever manager is here will always have the trust of the players.” “We are with the manager but we are not the ones who make decisions,” Marcelo added. Not directly, no. The president does that. And on Monday on Monday he did.

Talking points

• Partey time! The clock ticked down and Atlético could not find away through until Thomas Partey picked the ball up, burst through the middle, play exactly tee one two that Levante’s coaching staff had told the squad he plays, and finally get the only goal of the game. It took Atlético top of the table, two points ahead of Barcelona.

• Palo was the word: a post, a stick, a beating. Barcelona hit the post and Espanyol hit Barcelona.

• They were lucky with the refereeing but that’s five wins in a row now for Villarreal, who are looking good for a Champions League place and very good indeed for a Europa League slot. They’re six ahead of Athletic, 10 ahead of Sevilla and 13 ahead of Valencia.

• Another week, another Paco Jémez rant. And, frankly, he seems to be losing it a bit. “The club made a mistake; first of all, with me,” he said after his team’s 2-2 draw with Real Sociedad, a draw that leaves them in the relegation still. “The goals show clearly that we are not of a first division level. The club is wrong with us; we cannot go on letting in goals like this. Its a haemorrhage and we’re bleeding dry.”

• When Valencia won the penalty against Madrid at the weekend, André Gomes started celebrating as if they had already scored. This time, he was right, but that’s always a risk, and all the more so this season. Amrabat’s miss for Málaga on Saturday night means that 17 of 48 penalties have not been scored this season. At 36%, that’s the worst average for over 50 years.

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• So James says he was scared that the police car following him at 200km/h was actually a kidnapping and that’s why they were chasing him/ But also that he didn’t hear the siren or the requests for him to pull over because he had the music on so loud. What was he listening to? The Benny Hill theme?

• There were lots of Barcelona fans complaining about the difference between the way that Espanyol approach their games with Madrid and their games with Barcelona following a 0-0 draw in the Catalan derby on Saturday night. Which pretty much amounts to complaining at the fact that it was a derby. And, anyway, Espanyol have taken exactly the same number of points from Madrid as they have from Barcelona since the turn of the century. (And that’s not many). That said, it was pretty bad at times, if not quite as bad as some made out and at least it felt like a real derby again, unlike last year. “Cornella became Stalingrad,” said AS. Neymar, in particular, took some punishment. Speaking of punishment, for a long time referee González González seemed to have decided he wasn’t going to hand out any at all. In exaggerated summary: Barcelona hit the post and Espanyol hit Barcelona.